RACE AND THE AGRARIAN QUESTION IN BRAZIL, OR WHERE IS RACE IN BRAZILIAN AGRARIAN DEBATES?

Abstract

This paper develops a perspective centered on discussions of race and racialism as a way of revisiting the Brazilian agrarian question, pointing out gaps in the literature and critical potential for analysis. The proposal presents the agrarian question as a discursive and dynamic concept, understanding it from disputes between different social groups over the definition of a problem and their forms of intervention. Amidst these disputes are racialism and situations of internal colonialism, as well as forms of resistance that question the existence of an opaque and unique subject in the countryside. Forms of hierarchization, control, subjugation, and extermination of racialized populations, their bodies, knowledge, and forms of land use and occupation are present in the hegemonic narratives of economic, social, and political development, constituted as means of subjugating uprooted populations systematically dispossessed of their means of social reproduction. The transformations of the plantation and its foundation of violence against indigenous, traditional, quilombola, and peasant populations re-actualize the disqualification of groups and their ways of life, consolidating the modern image of economically viable, profitable, and integrated agriculture that recreates violence and schemes of racial continuum. However, there are also practices and forms of resistance that have systematically demonstrated that racial division is a central element of organization, political elaboration, and ways of life on the land.